After the steps of María la Portuguesa, the girl who impressed the legendary track of Carlos Cano | Culture | EUROtoday

Perhaps the one strategy to scrutinize the soul of the singer-songwriter Carlos Cano (Granada, 1946-2000) be via his songs. The folklore renovator, track singer and compromised jugglar, was current in every of its melodies. One of them, Maria the Portuguesethat sister Fado and Pasodoble, is a wound the place the ache of the Andalusian fishing village breathes that can preserve the reminiscence of this basic poet of the transition and autonomy of Andalusia alive. “It is a song that has exceeded limits, has crossed borders and has transcended the creator himself.” With a faint voice, tasted by melancholy, one of many artist’s daughters, Amaranta Cano, acknowledges on this musical icon “the true dimension” of a murals when the umbilical twine cuts with its creator and turns into “to the people”.

Maria the Portuguese It is now additionally the title of a documentary movie signed by the filmmaker Eduardo Montero, with a script by Ángel del Río, which serves Amaranta Cano for the reunion together with his father. “My father’s dimension at the popular level I really know her when she dies. The Carlos Cano Artist Documentary

“I am unable to stand that he’s lifeless and that his legacy is lifeless,” Amaranta Cano insists at the beginning of the footage. And in this effort to keep him alive, in the memory and musical history of this country, the daughter joins a trip to meet the father, with Maria the Portuguese As a medium. The filming of an expedition that also serves to rebuild the facts – some imagined, most real – in which Carlos Cano was inspired to write this classic.

Maria the Portuguese Carlos Cano firm in 1987 and belongs to his album Stay with the couplet. It has been versioned by many artists, fundamentally female voices, such as the great Fadista Amália Rodrigues, María Dolores Pradera, Passion Vega, Las Migas, Rozalén and Martirio, these last two present in the documentary. It is a hybridization of Fado, Main Caboverdiana, Copla and Pasodoble. But what is exactly narrated in Maria the Portuguese?

“The track says in a second ‘and a shot sounded.’ Maria the Portuguese? guard Portuguese (border police) killed Juan Flores, a Spanish shellfish, in full mouth of the Guadiana River, suspecting unlawful fishing and smuggling within the neighboring nation: a girl unknown to the household, Maria, veiled the physique all night time, accompanied the coffin within the cemetery till the tomb and disappeared. Upon understanding the information, Carlos Cano fabulated a love story.

The actual girl, nevertheless, “was not called Maria or Portuguese,” explains the journalist. The chronicles of the time, collected in sepia -dyed newspaper leaves that custody Loli Flores, the daughter of the deceased fisherman, inform us about an occasion that nearly causes a critical diplomatic disaster between Spain and Portugal and by which your entire city of Ayamonte went out to the road to ask for justice. After the judgments held in Vila Real de Santo Antonio, the guard José Antonio Nunes was convicted of reckless recklessness. Juan Flores left widow and two daughters, and his household solely obtained 200,000 compensation pesetas.

From the enigmatic girl, nevertheless, nothing mentioned the newspapers. Amaranta Cano visits Ayamonte and goes to the elders of the place, accustomed to watching outdated secrets and techniques and look the opposite means earlier than the questions of the outsiders. It is when crossing the border to Vila Real do Santo António the place Carlos Cano’s daughter is unmasking a girl who, in accordance with the Portuguese neighbors, “did not leave anyone indifferent.”

“Where it happened left a ray of joy, a trail of light.” “It was Spanish, but it became ours,” recall this girl born in 1926 on the Spanish aspect of the border as Maria, however renamed Portugal with the title of Aurora. “A person who did not go unnoticed”, “a figure that imposed”, “with her red lips, her vital color” … “I woke up hatred among married women, because she went with men,” he even acknowledges one of many geriatric staff the place Aurora spent the top of her days, Aquejada de Alzheimer’s.

However, behind this deadly girl’s legend, Aurora was, and there has discovered Amaranta Cano the consensus, a girl who “understood the needs of the people, her financial difficulties, helped people, so she was so well known; she asked the ship’s patterns for the ships for the most needy fishermen,” explains in Portuguese a good friend of the protagonist of the track of the track, It was not a romance, it was solidarity, due to the circumstances by which he died, injustice, to see the ache of a Spanish household on the border. ”

The documentary doesn’t reveal if this girl might see her story acknowledged within the track of Carlos Cano, so identified within the neighboring nation for the tribute that the Andalusian artist makes to the Fado. “It is a musical genre that deeply fascinated my father, as much as its most emblematic author, Amália Rodrigues,” says Amaranta.

“Amália Rodrigues and Carlos Cano make up the story of the Iberian Union,” says Fadista Teresa Salgueiro, gathered on this documentary with different artists, reminiscent of Martyrdom, Rozalén, Antonio Chainho and Raúl Rodríguez. For the latter, the greatness of Maria the Portuguese He summarizes not solely an inspiration, however the reunion of a daughter together with his father as an emblem of survival of a legacy: “María He has that factor of the nice artworks of turning a really native historical past right into a common reality, transplantable to so many nations which can be associated to the borders, the place folks need past administrative limits, the bridges skip and love one another with out a passport. ”